Boris Evelson

Vice President, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals

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Boris serves the Application Development & Delivery role. He is a leading expert in business intelligence (BI) — a set of processes, methodologies, and technologies used to transform raw data into meaningful, useful, and action-oriented enterprise information. Boris delivers strategic guidance, helping enterprises define BI strategies, governance, and architectures and identify vendors and technologies that help them put information to use in business processes and end user experiences.

Boris' current research focuses on the practical and actionable best practices for building BI infrastructure and applications, such as BI business cases, architectural options, organizational structures, and vendor selection. Boris continues to explore emerging trends in next-generation BI, such as agile BI architecture and development approaches, in-memory analytics, advanced data visualization, convergence of structured data and unstructured content analytics, process-driven and operational BI, and many others.

Previous Work Experience

Boris has more than 30 years of experience with enterprise software and applications implementation, management consulting, and strategic advisory skills. Most recently, Boris was a managing partner at Textra, a boutique strategic advisory firm serving all IT constituents: users, vendors, and investors. Boris cofounded Textra after spending several years as a VP and a strategic technology advisor at JPMorgan/LabMorgan, where he led many successful internal BI initiatives, advising the bank's large enterprise software clients on enterprise adoption issues and product and marketing strategies. Prior to JPMorgan, Boris served as a senior manager of data warehousing and customer relationship management (CRM) practices at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Boris started his career at Citibank, where, among many other successful projects, he implemented the bank's first global credit risk data warehouse.

Education

Boris holds a degree in music education from Moscow Gnessin School Of Music, Russia.

Print Bio

Boris Evelson

Vice President, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals

Read Boris's blog posts

Previous Work Experience

Education

Boris holds a degree in music education from Moscow Gnessin School Of Music, Russia.

Research Coverage

Boris Evelson's Research

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For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Forrester's 15-Step Methodology For Shortlisting BI Vendors

Tools And Technology: The Business Intelligence Playbook

November 9, 2018Boris Evelson

Business intelligence (BI) is a runaway locomotive that keeps picking up speed in terms of enterprise interest, adoption, and spending levels. The result: There are now more than 80 vendors in the segment. Their architectures and user interfaces vary, but they support similar use cases. This report tells application development and delivery (AD&D) pros working on BI initiatives how to decide which vendors belong on their shortlists of BI platforms. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Use BI Fabric To Optimize Your Multivendor Business Intelligence Environment

Performance Management: The Business Intelligence Playbook

October 30, 2018Boris Evelson

All enterprises must deal with multiple business intelligence (BI) platforms. Unquestionably, a single enterprise BI platform is ideal, but legacy platforms, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and poor alignment between business and technology pros are just some of many reasons most enterprises must deal with multiple BI tools for the foreseeable future. In this report, application development and delivery (AD&D) pros working on BI initiatives will learn about new BI fabric technologies that will make managing multiple BI platforms significantly easier. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Divide (BI Governance From Data Governance) And Conquer

Processes: The Business Intelligence Playbook

October 19, 2018Boris Evelson

The age of the customer and business agility require new approaches to business intelligence (BI) governance. Technology-organization-centric, restrictive, and inflexible governance processes no longer work. This report suggests how application development and delivery (AD&D) pros working on BI initiatives can "have your cake and eat it too," by continuing to reap Agile BI benefits while providing the necessary amount of BI governance. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For CIO Professionals

REPORT: Emerging Technology Spotlight: Natural Language Generation

Natural Language Generation Gives Human-Computer Interfaces The Gift Of Gab

October 9, 2018 Brandon Purcell, Boris Evelson

Companies are using natural language generation (NLG) to create written reports, explain visualizations in business intelligence (BI) tools, and develop chatbots and voice assistants that interact with customers. CIOs and business technology leaders should read this report to learn more about how NLG is developing artificially intelligent systems that "speak" to users.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: New Tech: Natural Language Generation (NLG) Technologies, Q3 2018

Forrester's Landscape Overview Of 12 Providers

September 24, 2018Boris Evelson, Christian Austin

A picture isn't always worth a thousand words. Even with the slickest dashboards, clients ask us, "Can't somebody just explain what the numbers mean to an executive?" Further, a human can't possibly scan through thousands of documents, categorize them, and write summaries of each. Different use case, but same problem. These are just some of the use cases for emerging natural language generation (NLG) technology. This report for AD&D pros outlines this nascent market, featuring 12 vendors with native capabilities and multiple established vendors offering NLG.

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Topic Overview: Business Intelligence

November 21, 2008Boris Evelson

Business intelligence (BI) is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information. It allows business users to make informed business decisions with real-time data that can put a company ahead of its competitors. Traditionally, core features like reporting and analytics have been the focus of BI technology choices, but as those features get commoditized, a whole new set of possibilities has emerged. Forrester's BI research shows that the technology is evolving and that enterprises on the cutting edge of these new trends can gain competitive advantage in their industries.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008

July 31, 2008Boris Evelson

In Forrester's 151-criteria evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, we found that IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects maintain their leadership positions, while Oracle and SAS Institute move into leadership positions in enterprise BI thanks to the richness of their functionality, ability to scale, and the completeness of their corporate and product vision and strategy. Actuate, Information Builders, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, SAP, and a new entrant, TIBCO Spotfire, came out as Strong Performers following very closely on the heels of the Leaders, offering very respectable alternatives and a multitude of choices for information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals. New entrants to this Forrester Wave™ evaluation of enterprise BI platforms (though not new to the market) are Panorama Software and QlikTech, who, while lacking the breadth of features to qualify them as single, large-enterprise BI solutions, are reputable Contenders. In some very specific BI use cases, they even outperform the Leaders.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2010

IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, and Oracle Lead, With Information Builders, SAS, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy Close Behind

October 20, 2010Boris Evelson

In Forrester's 145-criteria evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, we found that IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle, Information Builders , SAS, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy led the pack because of the completeness of not just BI, but overall information management functionality. Actuate came out as a Strong Performer on the heels of the Leaders offering equal — or in some cases superior — BI functionality, but it mostly relies on partners for the rest of its information management capabilities. TIBCO Spotfire also came out as a Strong Performer offering top choices for analytics, even surpassing other Strong Performers in the overall information management arena based on its traditional strength in middleware and application integration. Last but not least, QlikTech and Panorama Software moved up from Contenders and into the Strong Performers category based on the continuous improvements in their analytical capabilities.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Quantify The Tangible Business Value Of BI

Business Case: The Business Intelligence Playbook

January 10, 2018Boris Evelson, Martha Bennett

This report guides application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals working on business intelligence (BI) initiatives through the maze of BI business case categories and typical BI ROI components, and it identifies areas where quick wins are possible. This is an update of a previously published report; we revised this edition to factor in the latest findings from Forrester's Q4 2016 Global Business Intelligence Business Case Online Survey.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Build An Agile BI Organization To Support The Insights-Driven Culture

Organization: The Business Intelligence Playbook

November 2, 2017Boris Evelson

An insights-driven organizational culture is key to enterprise success and competitive differentiation, and Agile business intelligence (BI) is one of the required foundational components to make it successful. This report dives into the people part of the Agile BI tetrad — Agile BI software development, organizations, processes, and technologies. It provides an organizational framework that describes how application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals working on BI initiatives can align their BI organization for agility. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy. We revised this edition to factor in new data from Forrester's Q4 2016 Global Business Intelligence Organization Online Survey.